


35/3500 Fic Fest - "Favorite holiday?"

by berlynn_wohl



Series: The 35/3500 Fic Fest [6]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Barbecue, Brief mention of animal cruelty, Fireworks, Fourth of July, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-26
Updated: 2016-04-26
Packaged: 2018-06-04 17:30:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6667852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/berlynn_wohl/pseuds/berlynn_wohl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I must confess that I developed a taste for drinking cheap beer, eating too much red meat, and blowing shit up," Will said, "and all of those things are a little less pathetic if you do them in large groups on the Fourth of July.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	35/3500 Fic Fest - "Favorite holiday?"

**Author's Note:**

> In the spring of 2016, I reached 3500 followers on Tumblr. And if that wasn’t a big enough thrill, I’m about to turn 35. Yikes! I decided to celebrate both of these things by writing 35 fics for my loyal readers. I mined lists of Ask Box memes from sendmesomenumbers.tumblr.com to use as prompts for each fic.
> 
> Fics of over 1000 words (like this one!) are each posted separately on AO3; all the Hannistag fics are grouped in a single collection, and everything else under 1000 words I grouped into a second collection. Check out my series “The 35/3500 Fic Fest” to read all of them!

PLEASE NOTE: This is an AU where the type of fireworks featured are NOT illegal in the state of Virginia.   
  
Also, in this AU characters from the show occasionally get to experience the month of July.

 

*****

  
  
Jack was just about out of the room when he suddenly turned back to say, “Oh, and I’m looking forward to the barbecue, Will. Should Bella and I bring appetizers or a dessert?”

“Oh, uh, Bev’s bringing cupcakes, so something savory would be good, I guess.” He was cringing inside, that Jack had mentioned the barbecue in front of Hannibal. And sure enough, as soon as Jack was down the hall, Hannibal inquired about it.

“It’s just a thing I do for the Fourth of July every year,” Will explained. “Everyone else lives in the suburbs, but I can host a party with lots of fireworks, and people bring their kids, and the kids love the dogs.”

“I would not have thought you were so socially inclined,” Hannibal remarked.

“Well, you wouldn’t catch me hosting a Christmas party or an Easter egg hunt, that’s true. But the Fourth of July was always the big-deal holiday when I was growing up. I must confess that I developed a taste for drinking cheap beer, eating too much red meat, and blowing shit up, and all of those things are a little less pathetic if you do them in large groups on the Fourth of July.”

“I see. And who else is invited to this party?”

“Abigail. Alana.” Will raised an eyebrow. “You, maybe.”

“Maybe?”

Will had a vision of himself at this barbecue, relaxing with a beer in his hand in the shade of the porch, rather than slaving over the barbecue all day and breathing in charcoal smoke.

“It depends,” he said. “You know how to cook on a grill?”

 

*****

 

Will had Abigail in the passenger seat, and was regaling her with tales of his past Fourth of July exploits. “When I was a kid,” he told her, “we’d go to the Indian reservation to buy fireworks, because they sold stuff that was illegal.” He paused, then chuckled to himself, and went on, “There was this roadside stand I remember, on the highway, that had a big piece of plywood with a flaking painting of an eagle that looked kind of sick, and it said ‘Ill Eagle Fireworks.’”

When they got to the reservation, they parked in a vast dirt lot and made their way to the rows of stands. Abigail recognized the smaller, safe-and-sane fireworks she’d been allowed when she was younger: snakes and sparklers.

“Don’t bother with that kid stuff,” Will said, when he saw what she was looking at. “We’re just getting rockets and cakes.”

“Cakes?”

Will picked up the first example of such that he passed by: a cylinder eight inches in diameter and five inches thick. The top and bottom were covered in thin red paper, and around the middle was a garish, glossy label. “Colorful Exciting Flower Pearls,” it said.

Abigail focused her attention on these instead, as she followed Will. She recoiled at several misguided attempts by Chinese manufacturers to appeal to jingoistic American sensibilities. “USA Intensity,” one of the packages said. “Shock and Awe” featured a nighttime New York City skyline, with cartoony explosions pasted over the World Trade towers.

“Yeah, those are a little gross, huh,” Will said. “Don’t worry, we’ll find some with, uh, less politically-charged themes.”

Further along, Abigail picked up another cake, bright-green with pink lettering: “16-Shot Emerald City,” it said.

“You wanna get that one?”

“Yeah,” she said. Green was her favorite color.

Will told her to pick out a few more. She chose a “Crackling Salute,” a “Coconut Grove,” and a “Living Dead.”

Abigail paid attention to the totals Will was paying. A hundred dollars at this stand, a hundred and fifty at another, seventy-five at a third. And he paid it all in cash; he had come here prepared to fork over that much money, all in the course of a mere hour of shopping. And she had thought Doctor Lecter was extravagant.

 

*****

 

When Hannibal pulled up in his Bentley, Will, Jimmy, Bev, and Zeller were deep into swapping stories about the bizarre things they’d done with fireworks as kids.

“My little brothers taught me Slugs in Space,” Beverly said. “Did you guys do that? They taped slugs to bottle rockets and lit them, and when they went off, they would holler, ‘Sluuuugs iiiiiiiiin spaaaaaaaace!’”

“I perform autopsies on murder victims, but _that_ is the most god-awful thing I’ve ever heard,” Jimmy remarked, as Will put down his beer to get up and greet Hannibal. Hannibal popped the trunk of his Bentley, revealing a 36-quart cooler, presumably full of the meat he had generously offered to provide for the grill.

“Jesus, calm down,” Will said, “we’re not feeding all of Fairfax county.” He helped Hannibal haul the cooler over to where the grill was set up. The men all got up and gathered around the cooler, to see what kind of meat was going on the grill. All of them had come prepared to critique any choice made regarding both the food itself and the grilling techniques employed, but in both cases they were all stunned to silence by Hannibal’s contributions: flavorful homemade sausages and patties, each of which he proceeded to cook to succulent perfection.

Once everyone else was well-fed, and in many cases over-fed, Hannibal turned off the grill and sat in a folding chair next to Will with his own paper plate of food in his lap. It did not escape his notice that people were gawking at him, fascinated by the sight of the snobby Doctor Lecter with a plastic fork in his hand and an American-flag napkin in his lap. But he was unconcerned about their stares. He started to get up again, saying, “I nearly forgot, I’ve got a bottle of merlot in the car that would go beautifully with this—”

“For Christ’s sake, Hannibal, sit down.” Will opened the cooler next to him and handed a can over. “You can drink cheap beer on the Fourth of July,” he sneered.

“Can I have a beer today? Just one?” Abigail asked, clasping her hands to emphasize her sweet tone. “Please?”

Will considered this. “You can have one beer…or you can light off fireworks. Pick one.”

Abigail sighed dramatically and got up to pull a can of Coke out of the cooler.

Just before sundown, Will brought out a hundred-foot soaker hose and wetted down the brown grass all around his house. At the edge of the yard, he set up a battered old sawhorse, and leaned two eight-foot lengths of rain gutter up against it, facing away from the crowd. Next to it, he unfolded the legs of a card table that had seen better days. He got all the dogs into the house, then asked Abigail to help him bring out the fireworks. Everyone _ooh_ ed and _ahh_ ed over the size of them.

“You ready?” he said to Abigail.

Her face lit up. “Yeah!”

“Okay, we’re saving those three big ones for last,” he pointed. Then he pulled out two cigarette lighters, and handed her one. “Other than that, light whatever you want. Remember what I told you?”

“Light them and then run far away!” Abigail called back, as she made for the fireworks stash.

Up until then, everyone had been chatting away, but once the “Emerald City” went up, the attention was focused entirely on the sky. A single dart of white light zoomed upwards before bursting into spirals of glimmering green fire. Another followed, then another, until the sky was filled with dazzling showers of verdant sparks. Will broke his own rule immediately, after placing one rocket each in the rain gutters, sticking around after lighting the first one to quickly light the second one. They blazed one after the other into the atmosphere, spatterings of red and white light accompanying their ear-splitting whistles.

Abigail raced back and forth from the pile of fireworks to the card table, pausing only long enough to watch the display she was helping create. After all that money spent, and all that anticipation, the whole pile was depleted in fifteen minutes, leaving only the three biggest cakes. Will gathered them into his arms and brought them to the table. He fished another lighter out of his pocket and gestured Hannibal over. Together, the three of them lit all three cakes at once, resulting in a zooming, whizzing, shimmering spray of red, green, blue, purple, yellow, and white.

And then it was over. Things went quiet. Everyone was realizing how tired they were, how annoying the mosquitoes were. Abigail had a belly full of junk food and lungs full of black powder smoke, and she was feeling slightly ill from it, but she was still ecstatic.

“Was that fun?” Will asked, as Abigail looked up at the night sky, now curiously tranquil and dark.

“Yes! This was the best!” She clapped her hands together, but as she glanced around, she felt the contented fatigue all around her, saw people saying their goodbyes and getting into their cars, and realized that the fun was now over. “Do I have to go back to the hospital tonight?”

“It’s a long drive, isn’t it,” Will sighed. “Tell you what: I’ll give them a call and tell them you’re staying over with me tonight. But if I do that, you have to help me clean up the fireworks mess in the morning.”

Abigail cheered, “It’s a deal!”

 


End file.
